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Online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods with continuous actions are playing a prominent role when dealing with real-world applications such as Robotics. However, when confronted to non-stationary environments, these methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-07 Mehdi Khamassi , Costas Tzafestas

We consider the problem of time-limited robotic exploration in previously unseen environments where exploration is limited by a predefined amount of time. We propose a novel exploration approach using learning-augmented model-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Yimeng Li , Arnab Debnath , Gregory Stein , Jana Kosecka

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated remarkable potential in enhancing the reasoning capability of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, RLVR often drives the policy toward over-determinism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Shimin Zhang , Xianwei Chen , Yufan Shen , Ziyuan Ye , Jibin Wu

Exploration is critical to a reinforcement learning agent's performance in its given environment. Prior exploration methods are often based on using heuristic auxiliary predictions to guide policy behavior, lacking a mathematically-grounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Lisa Lee , Benjamin Eysenbach , Emilio Parisotto , Eric Xing , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning. Recently bonus-based methods have achieved considerable successes in environments where exploration is difficult such as Montezuma's Revenge, which assign additional bonuses (e.g.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-02 Yan Song , Yingfeng Chen , Yujing Hu , Changjie Fan

Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt

We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…

Exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in environments with sparse or adversarial reward structures. In this work, we study how the architecture of deep neural policies implicitly shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Jacob Adamczyk

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in fields like robotics and autonomous driving, but adversarial attacks designed to mislead RL systems remain challenging. Existing approaches often rely on modifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Junyong Jiang , Buwei Tian , Chenxing Xu , Songze Li , Lu Dong

Boltzmann exploration is a classic strategy for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, and is one of the most standard tools in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Despite its widespread use, there is virtually no theoretical understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Claudio Gentile , Gábor Lugosi , Gergely Neu

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in sensorimotor learning. Major advances have been demonstrated in noise-free, non-stochastic domains such as video games and simulation. However, most of these formulations either get stuck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Deepak Pathak , Dhiraj Gandhi , Abhinav Gupta

Recent research on structured exploration placed emphasis on identifying novel states in the state space and incentivizing the agent to revisit them through intrinsic reward bonuses. In this study, we question whether the performance boost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Sneha Aenugu

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang